[746]: Saving my Assassin by Virginia Prodan

A gripping memoir of a woman’s staunch faith and unwavering quest to defend those prosecuted by Ceausescu’s brutal regime.

Saving my Assassinby Virginia Prodan

The author grew up at a time when Romania was in the grips of a dictator named, Nicolae Ceaucescu. However, you need not to widen the scope of the kind of childhood she grew up in to know that she survived far more atrocities. Just witness the difficult homelife she endured in the hands of her ‘mother’, her siblings, and her sometimes indifferent, sometimes caring father. To this day, weeks after finishing this book, I still couldn’t comprehend the awful dynamics of her relationship with her mother.

It was implied that she might’ve been an illegitimate child of her favourite aunt but I honestly can’t recall whether or not it was determined. In any case, I did not understand the kind of hold her mother had over her aunt. I did wonder, though if having an illegitimate child back then was a criminal act.

The title is very misleading. Perhaps it’s the romantic in me that had me believing that this book would be, in fact, about a love affair that started when an assassin was hired to kill off Virginia. The truth of the matter is, the assassin was introduced as a prologue and we don’t see him again until the end. The entirety of the novel was about Virginia’s childhood, adulthoood and how she came to be the defender of the faithful being prosecuted unjustly at the time of Nicolae Ceausescu’s tyrannical rule.

Virginia didn’t start off as a devout Christian. The evolution of her faith began when, little by little, her eyes were opened to the atrocities of what living in Romania was like. Especially when her people were being punished for their religious beliefs. As a child, she was incessantly curious. She hungered for truth which often got her in trouble. You’re supposed to be quiet if you’re a child. You’re not supposed to ask questions. Her naturally curious disposition had led her to nights of going to bed without meals and added chores as a child. As an adult, it’s what made her the crusader for the truth and justice.

It is odd to feel like someone’s life is a story full of plot holes, but that’s how I felt about Virginia’s book life. I wish I’d known for sure why she was thus hated by her mother, or if her aunt was in fact, her real mother. The assassin’s life also played very little significance to the book other than the beginning and what role she played in his life (which we didn’t witness, by the way).

I went into this book with the assumption that it was going to be a romance. I came out knowing the strength and courage of a woman who feared nothing, and one who only cared about truth, justice, and defending the unjustly aggrieved.